


Owed By So Many to So Few

by 2ndA



Series: GK/WWII AU [1]
Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - World War II, M/M, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-16
Updated: 2014-05-16
Packaged: 2018-01-25 01:00:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1623296
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2ndA/pseuds/2ndA
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>written for the combat_jack porn meme prompt “WWII AU: Nate Fick is a young British farmer who rescues an injured soldier, Brad. Sex Hurt Comfort etc” I needed a little backstory for the porn...and 31 pages later, here we are!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Owed By So Many to So Few

**Author's Note:**

> Totally fictitious...vaguely based on the characters portrayed in the miniseries and various things I've read about the time period. Epigraph is General Patton, title is Winston Churchill. Don't care how AO3 tags it--this is PART ONE
> 
> Sequels tagged at my LJ: http://2ndary-author.livejournal.com/tag/%22wwii_au%22%20%28gk%29

_The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo._

If Sergeant Brad Colbert lies flat and absolutely still in his infirmary bed and cranes his head to the right until the pull of his casted arm borders on agony, he can just make out a sliver of sky through the infirmary window. He discovered this trick the day he arrived on the ward after smashing his left arm in a training accident, and now he seeks out that little bit of blue whenever things become too much. He projects himself out there, into that cold clean blue, when the wireless spouts news of more German victories in Europe while he’s stuck here vegetating in an English hospital , no good to anyone (no Christmas in Berlin this year, either). He seeks it out when the doctors tell him his arm hasn’t set right, that breaking and recasting will keep him out of ‘planes for the next six weeks. He’s pretty much started turning his head toward the sky automatically as soon as the kid in the next bed opens his mouth.  
  
“C’mon, buddy,” Ray whines. “It’s fucking Christmas!”  
  
“I’m _Jewish_ ,” Brad retorts.  
  
Ray snorts, his eyerolling unimpeded by the giant dressing that covers the burns on his face. “Seriously—how do you get to be such a moron? I mean, I know I’m starting a little late, Brad, but if I really worked at emulating you in every regard, do you think I, too, could ascend to your heights of moronitude? That would be my _dream_.”  
  
Brad ignores him, squelches the desire to explain that ‘moronitude’ is not a word, and concentrates on his little piece of sky. If it weren’t for stupid Trombley mis-reading the goddamn landing checklist, he would be out there right now.Close to heaven, Brad thinks to himself: speed, solitude, and no one can touch me.  
  
Ray, of course, keeps talking. Brad has known him for two weeks, and heard his entire life story in the first hour of their acquaintance. Kid hasn't shut up since. Ray grew up in the States, in the heart of the Appalachian coal belt, carrying a wrench from the time he could walk. Nearly two years ago, back when the US was still a neutral power and Americans couldn’t legally enlist in the British Royal Air Force, Ray had lied his way into a mechanic’s job by swearing he was Canadian, of all things. So instead of doing his bit on the homefront in Jerkville, Kentucky working some essential-to-the-war-effort job for time-and-a-half, he is putting out fires _with his face_ as an RAF mechanic.  Clearly, he lacks the slightest sense of self-preservation, an observation that is confirmed when he sees a familiar face out on the ward and calls for reinforcements.  
  
“Doc? Hey, Doc! Come in here and tell Brad to stop being such a fucking killjoy,” he shouts to the passing Corpsman.  
  
Doc sticks his head through the doors that separate the ‘Lightly Wounded’ from the rest of the infirmary. “Corporal Person,” he says politely, “please speak up. I would be delighted to watch the Matron act on her threat to wash your mouth out with soap.”  
  
Brad snorts. Doc and the hospital’s head nurse have been battling it out for as long as he’s been here. There’s a pool going among the Lightly Wounded about who will prevail. Ray says it’s unpatriotic to bet against Doc, but Brad figures they’re all on the same side now.   Besides, betting that Matron will ever cede any ground to a noncommissioned med student seconded from the US Navy is like burning money.

“Got the place to yourselves, hmmm?” Doc walks down the aisle between empty beds to Brad’s tiny window, which he opens a crack. He lights a cigarette and sighs the smoke into the cold December air. Everyone else smokes like chimneys—on the wards, in the surgery, they even package cigarettes with the fucking meals—but Doc has some crazy theory about tobacco smoke being bad for patients. (“Probably bad for all of us,” he told Brad once, “clogs up the lungs.” “I don’t see you quitting,” Brad had retorted sharply; he’d just gotten the news about re-setting his arm and he was not feeling kindly toward the medical profession. But Doc had just smirked—Brad’s never heard him laugh—and said, “Well, who wants to live forever, anyway?”)  
  
“That’s what I was _telling_ you,” Ray squawks, even though he wasn’t. “Everyone else has left for the holidays, except Mr. Doom-and-Gloom over here.”  
  
“That’s Sergeant Doom, to you, Corporal,” Brad says mildly, accepting the cigarette Doc offers him.  
  
“They…left for the holidays?” Doc holds out the cigarette case to Ray, who takes two and sticks one behind his ear.  
  
“The VADs fucking farmed out everyone who could walk, sent them to spend the week with locals who want to help the war effort by ‘hosting an airman far from home,’” Brad can taste the sarcasm in his voice.  
  
“But not you?” Doc is examining the square of cardstock left on the window-ledge, the little one that assigns Sgt. B. Colbert (USAAF) and Corp’l. J. Person (RAF) to Mathilda Farm from 23 December 1942 to 1 January 1943.  
  
“I don’t like charity,” Brad says, shortly.  
  
“How’s the arm?” Doc asks, suddenly, changing the subject. Brad wiggles the fingers at the edge of the cast. He’s fine, really. _As he keeps telling people_. But the fucking retarded chain of command won’t believe him without medical clearance and his case is ‘not a priority.’  
  
“It’s fine.”  
  
“And how’s your head?”  
  
Brad glances over at the doctor. It gets dark early here in December and in the dying afternoon light from the window, Doc looks more tired than usual. Still, he’d have to be fucking catatonic to mix up a diagnosis like that. “Ray’s the one who was dropped on his head as a baby. My head is fine…”  
  
“I ask,” Doc says casually, picking a flake of tobacco off his tongue, “because it sounds like you might need to have it surgically removed from your _ass!_ Has it occurred to you that the hospital staff will have enough trouble taking care of the patients who can’t be moved? The last thing they need over their holiday is two more. I’m telling Matron you’ll be gone as soon as...” he glances again at the card, “as soon as Mr. Fick can scrounge up the gas ration coupons to get you out to his farm.”

The doctor runs a hand across his face, fucking exhausted, the fight gone out of him as suddenly as it came. “Look, this farmer was probably too ancient for the _last_ war, much less this one. Go out there, let the missus feed you tea and some inedible Christmas cake, listen when the old man tells you how there were real wars back in his day.  Be a goddamned human being for a few days.” Doc closes the window and pulls the black-out curtains across it with a snap. “For fuck’s sake—it’s Christmas,” he calls over his shoulder as he stalks out to find the Matron.  
  
Brad sighs and drops back on his pillow. “I'm _Jewish_ ,” he tells the ceiling.

++++

It turns out that Farmer Fick gets to keep his ration coupons; Matron is apparently so eager to see them off that she finds space in an RAF truck—lorry, Brad reminds himself; people here call them lorries—headed out to the farm the next morning. It is a vaguely scenic trip. The hospital porter who is driving stops humming long enough to explain that the military basically bought up the entire town of Tangmere in 1939 so they could expand the Great-War-era airfield. Most of the families were relocated to make space for RAF personnel.  
  
“Nearly everyone else who was leaving for the holidays had to go by train,” Stafford explains, “on account of there being so few families left here.”  
  
“Guess we’re just lucky.”  
  
“Oh, no,” the porter says, cheerfully oblivious to Brad's sarcasm, “Matron said she rather thought you’d be a hard case, so she assigned you somewhere you could get to last minute-like.”  
  
Ray, squashed between Brad and the gearbox, fails to turn his laugh into a cough. Brad glowers; he hates many, many things right now, of which being predictable is not the least.  
  
“Of course, don’t tell the girl that. She thinks you picked Mathilda at the ward Christmas raffle.”  
  
“What girl?!” Ray perks up.  
  
“The Fick girl. She lives out at the Farm with her brother. In fact, it was probably her idea to have you. Her brother’s a little…well, nice enough, I’m sure, but rather a recluse.”  
  
Great, Brad thinks to himself. Fantastic. True British eccentrics. He can only hope Ray’s deplorable sister-fucking tendencies do not extend to _other people’s_ sisters. “How come they were allowed to stay in the area when everyone else had to move?”  
  
“Oh, I expect it’s because of Mr. Fick’s work with the—“ the vehicle suddenly jerks to the side, sending Ray into Brad and Brad into the door. “Sorry!” Stafford says, chipper, “spot of damage to the road—it’s impossible to get anything fixed properly these days.”  
  
“You were saying?” Brad asks when they’ve run over three more potholes and pulled off onto a tributary road.  
  
“Was I? Oh, that’s right—it’s the Farm, I imagine. You see, it’s rather a large farm and now turned over entirely to war-work. Keeps us all from getting scurvy down in the mess hall in Tangmere. Ever so much more convenient than having veg and things shipped all the way in from Scotland…Not many Land Girls, though,” Stafford adds mournfully.  
  
“Ever so,” Brad agrees, vowing to drown himself in the goddamn Channel before settling for a Scottish Land Girl. If Stafford realizes he’s being made fun of, he doesn’t react. He hums all the way to Mathilda, where he drops both men and their kit bags off in the dooryard.

“Want me to bring in the bags, then, gents? You say the word,” Stafford offers, mindful of Brad’s cast.  
  
“Uhm? No, no, that’s fine. We’re fine, thanks.” Brad is staring at the…well, he suppose it would have to be called a farmhouse. But only because it is, allegedly, on a farm. Otherwise, it bears no resemblance to the farmhouses he’s familiar with. He’d spent two years digging ditches all over the Pacific Northwest with the WPA, and a year before that bumming odd jobs across California. He’s seen his fair share of farms. What Fick and his sister have here is a mansion. Brad remembers his father’s lessons in architecture: the style is what is called Federalist in the States, neo-Classical in Europe—broad, symmetrical brick white columns and a cupola.  
  
“Holy shit,” Ray mutters.  
  
“Happy Christmas!” Stafford calls, backing the tru—lorry down the drive.  
  
Apparently someone inside hears him; the door flies open and a girl bounces out. “Are you our soldiers?! Happy Christmas! Nate—” she turns back to call over her shoulder. “Nate, they’re here!”  
  
She bounds over to Brad, grabs his hand, and pumps it fervently. “Hullo. I’m Louisa. Who are you? It’s lovely to meet you. Do you like gingerbread? You’re very tall. We thought you weren’t coming. _I_ thought you weren’t, anyway, but Nate said you would. Nate—” she turns again to call for her brother, only to find that he’s come out of the house and is standing right behind her.  
  
“Hullo. Nate Fick,” Nate shakes Ray’s hand and then Brad’s. “Happy Christmas!”  
  
They stand awkwardly in the drive for a moment. Brad is about to explain his religious affiliation (third time lucky) when Ray bursts, “Oh! You’re _YOU_.”  
  
“Uhm, yes. Yes, I suppose I am,” Nate says affably, and ever afterward, Brad will think of this when he hears someone mention ‘British phlegm.’ This is usually the part of the conversation where he apologizes for his whiskey tango countryman, but it’s just dawned on him—as it has on Ray—that this Nate Fick is the _only_ Mr. Fick. There is no elderly farmer, just this kid, somewhere between twenty and thirty-five. At precisely that moment, Nate reaches to smooth his windruffled hair off his forehead and Brad realizes that he’s holding a raveled woolen sock. Farmer Fick, of Mathilda Farm, Tangmere, West Sussex, England, Great Britain who should, by rights, be out defending the Empire against the marauding Hun is instead whiling away this December morning darning socks with his kid sister.

Jesus fuck. Eleven days with civilians.  
  
“Right.” Brad gives up: “Happy Christmas.”

++++

Upon entering the house, however, Brad gains a new appreciation for wool. He also realizes why Nate is wearing not one but two sweaters. He has been in warmer meat-lockers.  
  
“Sorry,” Nate apologizes immediately. “It’s impossible to keep the place heated on the allotment of coal we get. We’ve shut up most of the house, but one must make do.”  
  
“Would you like a scarf?” Louisa produces one from somewhere in the poorly lit entry hall. “I made it myself!”  
  
“Lou started knitting socks for the Red Cross and now there’s no stopping her,” Nate says as Brad finds himself engulfed in gray wool. “Uhm, Lou, why don’t you show Corporal Person his room so he can get settled in.”  
  
“Super!” Louisa wrestles Ray’s kitbag out of his hands and sets off across what seems to be an acre of floor. On the way, she makes polite conversation: “D’you have a favorite princess? Mine’s Margaret Rose—she’s so stylish. But I do like Elizabeth's dogs. After I show you your room, I’ll bring you to see our dogs. Nate says it’s wrong to pick favorites because they’re just people but I think…”  
  
Brad stares after them. “What a… _precocious_ child.”  
  
Nate’s expression suggests he knew that wasn’t Brad’s first adjective. “Kind of you to say,” he replies, dryly. “If you’d like, I can show you to your room. You might like a chance to write letters or something before lunch. I’m afraid we’ll be eating in the kitchen—the heating, you know.”  
  
Brad makes sympathetic noises about the heating; if he has to comment on the difficulty of finding good servants these days, he’ll hitch right back to the RAF infirmary, Matron or no. Fortunately, Nate does not seem overly given to small talk. He walks Brad around the first floor. The entry hall is a two-story space, lit from above by windows in the cupola, with a gallery running around the second floor. “Library’s here, dining room’s next to it,” Nate gestures to doors opening off the checkerboard tiles. “Other side is the drawing room, the morning room, and the music room, but they’re shut up now. The Old Wing is closed up, too.Kitchen is back that way, along with the conservatory and the estate offices, used mostly by the Ministry of Ag folks, so you may see them about.”

Nate leads Brad up the staircase to the rooms that open off the gallery. He has somehow winkled the kitbag right out of Brad's own hand. He also knows to stay on Brad’s good side to avoid knocking the awkward plaster cast. “All the rooms on this side are shut up, nursery and such.” He gestures across the hall. “The girls’ rooms are on that side—Lou and my older sister, Em—she’ll be in for Christmas if she can get a train. Corporal Person will be in that corner room (“Please,” Brad interrupts, “call him Ray. Otherwise, you’ll just encourage him.”). And you’re right in here,” Nate concludes, leading Brad to the door next to Ray’s. “We’ve opened up a second bath—it’s that little door next to, uh, Ray’s. And I’m right at the corner if you need anything at night. We leave torches at the head of the stairs. It gets awfully dark.”  
  
Flashlights, Brad translates, banishing the image of wandering around with a burning branch when he needs to take a leak at night. Looking up, he realizes that the intricate glasswork of the cupola has been painstakingly painted black, as have the mullioned windows at each corner of the gallery. The rest are hung with heavy blackout curtains. It puts the house in perpetual evening.  
  
“Quite strict rules about blackouts, this close to the airfield,” Nate explains quietly, following Brad’s gaze. His voice sounds so hollow in the big empty hall that Brad finds himself—suddenly, unexpectedly—feeling sorry for this guy who's had to shut up and give away portions of what must have been a magical place to grow up.  
  
“Who was Mathilda?” Brad asks, to fill the silence.  
  
“Oh, an Empress. First woman to rule England, though the claim is disputed. No relation; I am assured of this,” Nate smiles as though he can read Brad’s thoughts about the English aristocracy. “My great-grandfather tried to dignify his origins by setting himself up as a landed gentleman; he made all his money inventing some sort of gauge for rail cars. He rather felt women had got a raw deal from history; the home farm is called Eleanor House, after Eleanor of Aquitaine.”  
  
“Interesting choice.”  
  
“My family,” Nate shrugs fondly, “are interesting people.”

“It’s just you and your sister?”  
  
“Right. Em’s doing a training course in London, so it’s just me and Lou, rattling about here.”  
  
Brad is trying to decide if he can politely ask about Nate’s profession, or his future plans—he looks perfectly healthy: surely he intends to enlist before long? Maybe when his sister returns from her course?—and Nate takes that moment to excuse himself. “I should make sure Louisa isn’t talking Ray’s ear off or trying to get him to adopt one of her kittens or something. We’ll eat at about noon, in the kitchen as I told you, and dinner at eight. Lou and I generally spend the evening in the library—it’s warmest—and you and, er, Ray are welcome to join us. Also, we…uhm, it’s rather a tradition that we dress for dinner on Christmas Eve, although please don’t feel that you have to…” Nate trails off.  
  
“Thank you,” Brad realizes this is the first time he’s said this. “Thank you very much. For everything. Ray and I would be delighted to participate.” He makes a mental note to remind Ray about forty times before dinner the next night. The VADs had asked them to clear out their tiny infirmary storage lockers and so, tucked at the bottom of his bag, Brad has most of his uniform—certainly enough to pass muster at dinner in a half-empty country house with a 4F master and a ten-year-old mistress.  
  
Brad’s room was evidently brought out of retirement just for him. It smells like lemon furniture polish, except for the giant bed, which smells like lavender. The bed and wardrobe are huge and vaguely art noveau—probably top of the line about twenty years ago. An armchair by the fireplace is stacked with towels and blankets whose thickness and warmth pre-date rationing. In one of the pigeonholes of the corner writing desk, he finds a stack of brittle pasteboard squares printed with ‘Mathilda Farm, Tangmere’ and is suddenly transported to his tenth-grade literature class at Lincoln High School. Visiting cards. He’d always thought Jane Austen had invented those as a plot device. The other pigeonholes yield two dried pen nibs and a photograph of three carefully posed children. Two of the children—a toddler and a little girl with a hairbow the size of her head—are young enough to be indistinguishable; behind them stands a boy in a sailor suit, maybe ten years old. He is looking forthrightly into the camera, one arm on his sister’s shoulder. In the black-and-white photograph, his eyes are gray and his expression is preternaturally serious. What would it take, Brad wonders, to make Nate Fick laugh?

++++

Hanging clothes with one good arm takes a while, even when you have few clothes and a wardrobe the size of Trafalgar Square. Finished with his only chore, Brad meanders down to the first floor. Nate has disappeared; Ray seems to be amusing himself in the kitchen by spinning lies about Canada to the little girl, Louisa. (“Have I ever killed a bear? Hah! Have I ever killed a bear, she asks?! Sweetheart, let me tell you about Canadian bears…”).

Brad tries the handle on one of the heavy wooden doors and finds himself in the library. This room really _is_ warmer, mostly because a row of French doors trap sunlight. A low table by the fireplace contains a half-finished wool something, the needles still stuck in it, and a pattern…looks like Louisa is trying to make balaclavas for the Merchant Marines. The titles on the shelves run heavily to the classics—lots of Greek, even more Latin—with a few titles in French and a set of Dickens. There is a surprising amount of poetry. Other than a collection of pamphlets put out by the War Information Board ( _MAKE DO AND MEND: The Board of Trade Guide to Making Your Clothes Last!_ ) Brad cannot see anything more recent than a 1927 Rudyard Kipling reprint. There is a week-old copy of the London _Times_ ; someone has been filling out the crossword in ink. Brad scoffs audibly when he sees that fifteen down has been left blank (11 letters, meaning ‘lofty and king-like’) and decides to help Nate along by filling it in. He sits down on a divan to page through the paper as best he can with his functional hand. Three hours later, he wakes up.

Somewhere a clock is chiming. Twelve o’clock is lunch, Brad reminds himself. In the kitchen. Because of the heating. He stands up as the details come back to him, surprised at himself; he hasn’t dropped off in the middle of the day since…well, he can’t remember the last time. He looks out the French windows. Beyond the terrace, beyond the lawn and the trees that edge it, he can see a small silver flash taking off from the Tangmere base; he watches until its brightness becomes part of the sun.  
  
Lunch is soup in the vast kitchen, with Lou’s currant buns for dessert. (Louisa proudly informs the assembled diners that one can make a hundred currant buns with one ration of sugar. Brad is not surprised by this statistic.) Dinner is more soup and Woolton pie. Both meals are eaten with various Home Service volunteers who have been assigned to keep the farm running while the original workers are off serving King and Country. A man named Poke tries to start a discussion on Indian independence, though it doesn’t really catch. There’s a reporter from a London daily, formerly an Agony Aunt columnist, hoping to make his big break by writing about the homefront. Lou divides her attention between Ray and a young man named who everyone calls Walt, because his original name is totally unpronounceable.  
  
“What’s his story?” Brad asks Nate, because he’s never seen Ray attend to another person’s conversation as closely as he does now. The Corporal seems to be fascinated by Walt’s mouth.  
  
“Walt? He came over from Poland to study in London, and then, of course, Poland was invaded. So now he can’t go back—the Polish government is in exile. So the Land Labor people sent him here. Much to Louisa’s delight. I rather think she has a crush.”  
  
“Hmm,” Brad notices that the tips of Walt’s ears flush whenever Ray talks to him. “Her currant buns are wasted on that one,” he remarks without really thinking, and then wishes he could bite his tongue. Even an American bumpkin knows shocking your host is not good manners.  
  
Nate, though, is not shocked. He just glances over at Walt and Ray playing goo-goo eyes like a pair of fucking teenagers and says placidly, “Yes, I see what you mean.” Then he goes back to eating his soup.  
  
Brad nearly chokes on a current. “And you don’t…mind?”  
  
Nate looks surprised by Brad’s surprise. And then he laughs. He leans across the table, close enough that Brad can smell him (lavender, like the sheets; it must be something they put in the laundry soap). “I have been assured that there is no place more homoerotic than the military, but as a public school graduate, I venture to nominate a British boys’ boarding school for second place in that particular contest.”

++++

After lunch, Brad walks seven miles back along the road that Stafford had taken from Tangmere. Commerce in the town consists primarily of the pub, the tobacconist, and the British equivalent of a PX, but Ray knows a guy who knows a guy. For the first time in his life, Brad buys Christmas presents. When in Rome, he’d explained to Ray, you observe—you do not admire, and you sure as hell do not go skulking around so that ‘a guy’ can set you up with certain unmentionables. And yet, here he is. (“Hmm…somebody’s getting coal in his stocking this year,” Ray had mused innocently. “In his nice, hand-darned wool stocking, perhaps, if he plays his cards right.”) Purchasing completed, he sits in the pub and writes a letter home. Another first: he actually has more to say than ‘I am well and hope this letter finds you the same.’ By the time he arrives back at Mathilda, it is time for tea, which is mostly hot water, taken in the library. Nate sits at his desk and does some sort of paperwork, but Brad is called upon to judge Lou’s charades contest. Ray accuses him of cheating.  
  
That night, Nate goes from room to room, pulling blackout curtains and lighting fires in the grates. Brad suspects the true inhabitants of Mathilda Farm have been scrounging coal for weeks to make the house as warm as it is…and even that is not terribly warm. They have probably been cold a long time. (“Keeping calm and carrying on is not working out so well,” Ray had observed, noticing the motto on one of the War Ministry pamphlets in the library. “Maybe they should try bombing shit and raising hell…”).  
  
Brad settles under a small mountain of blankets, only to find that he cannot sleep. At first, he thinks it’s because he napped earlier in the day, but a fourteen-mile hike to town and back should have been enough to tire him out. At about 1:00 AM, he realizes what is missing: the sound of Ray breathing. Actually, the sound of _anyone_ breathing. Hospital ward, barracks, troop transport, WPA lodging—he’s just used to having someone else out there in the darkness, even if they’re fast asleep. He tells himself not to be a baby, reminds himself to enjoy the luxury of having this whole room to himself. It doesn’t work. Finally, he remembers the flashlights out on the landing and all the books in the library below. He wouldn’t run the batteries down—surely just a few pages of Charles Dickens would be enough to send him off to dreamland.

The air in the hallway outside his bedroom is so cold, Brad curses before he can stop himself. He is stumbling toward where he thinks the flashlight might be when he hears a door open.  
  
“Lou?” Nate calls quietly.  
  
“Uh, no. It’s just me. Brad.”  
  
“Oh.” Suddenly a flashlight beam flicks on and Brad can see Nate standing in his doorway. He wears a sweater over his pajamas and lumpy socks on his feet; his hair is pillow-flat on one side. “Sorry”—Brad will never become accustomed to the British habit for apologizing first thing—“I thought you were Lou. And, uhm…do you need anything?”  
  
“Oh, no. I just. I can’t sleep, so I thought I might—”  
  
“It’s the cold, isn’t it?” Nate shakes his head ruefully. “I am sorry about that. The rest of us are used to it, but I imagine it’s quite different from being in hospital. Would you like a jumper?”  
  
Before Brad can demur, Nate turns back into his room, taking the light with him.  
  
“It’s not the cold, really,” Brad insists, following him. “I’m just…”  
  
“A cardigan might fit best over your cast,” Nate appears with one. “Lou has been collecting jumpers; she reuses the wool for her projects.”  
  
“…used to sleeping with someone. That is,” Brad is astonished to find himself blushing, “you know, someone else in the room.”  
  
Nate blinks in the light. “Oh.” And then he smiles. “I know quite what you mean; I had the same trouble myself when I left school and went up to university. But that, at least, is more easily mended than the heating. You’re quite welcome to the spare bed in here.”  
  
The whole conversation is conducted at a whisper;the need for quiet and the small circle of artificial light makes this meeting seem strangely intimate. That—and the desire to make sure Nate doesn’t think he’s a wimp about the cold—is the only reason Brad can think of for accepting Nate’s offer. Before he’s entirely sure what is happening, Nate has banked the fire in the guest room and hauled blankets and pillows to the narrow twin bed that matches his own. In the morning, Brad will realize how ridiculous it all was—‘don’t like your huge and comfortable spare room? Not a problem! Let’s just move you in the middle of the night.’ But somehow, in the wee small hours, Nate made it seem totally reasonable, even normal. (Brad is not surprised to find out in the next few days that, in addition to running the Farm, Nate is also the local air raid warden. He is exactly the sort of person you would want in command during an emergency). In five minutes, Brad is ensconced in a new bed; in ten minutes, he can hear Nate breathing, even and quiet, from the other side of the room. And then, he is asleep.

++++

He wakes up at 5:00, when Nate goes out to see to the milking (Mathilda apparently keeps one cow—named Moo, Nate explains in a whisper when Brad asks where he’s going, “Lou named it when she was a baby”), drags himself back to his own room. Somehow, now that the light is peeking in at the edges of the blackout curtain, he manages to drift back off to sleep for a few hours. He scrounges breakfast in the cavernous kitchen, makes himself useful by toasting bread one-handed and scrambling eggs with condensed milk for various farm staff who wander in. One of the farm managers, Patterson, offers to walk him around the operation, so Brad gets to see a little of it. It is Christmas Eve, so any of the workers who could get away have done so. Patterson himself leaves after lunch; Nate drives him and a few other stragglers to the train station in Chichester when he goes to pick up his sister.  
  
Em Fick is tall like Nate and dark like Louisa, a true middle child. She brings current newspapers and imitation coffee from London and is not at all surprised to find her siblings have invited two random soldiers and a Polish civilian to share Christmas Eve dinner. “One year it was a traveling salesman,” she reminisces, “Another time it was most of Nate’s fifth form class, for some reason. And the year of the railroad strike, I think we had nearly everyone who got stranded at Chichester station. Robbie threatened to sleep in the snow if he was put out of his bed. Lou, run out and get the big package from the car, but don’t let Nate see,” she teases, right in front of Nate. “And now, I am gasping for a cup of tea.”  
  
The flurry of arrival disperses—Nate to attend to more paperwork in the library; Lou, squealing, to the car, Walt and Ray trailing behind her. Em and Brad are left in the entrance hall. “Who’s Robbie?” Brad asks, finding himself unsurprisingly charmed by the newest addition to the family Fick.  
  
“Our brother,” Em says, and her voice aches.  
  
“Oh.” Brad thinks of the infant in that picture he found, and of Nate sleeping in a small twin bed when there are half a dozen empty bedrooms available. He doesn’t have to ask for details: he knows what happens to young men in a world at war. “I’m very sorry.”

                                                                                                                                  ++++

Dressing for dinner on Christmas Eve, there are two things that Brad realizes too late. The first is that his mess dress jacket will not fit over his cast. The second is that it is physically impossible to tie a regulation tie when one of your elbows in encased in plaster. He’s standing in front of the wardrobe mirror in his room, trying to pin one end down with his chin while wrapping the other end… when Ray bursts into the room without knocking.  
  
“Fucker took my last clean shirt!” Ray yelps.  
  
Brad takes a deep breath and reminds himself that killing Ray is not mission effective. “Walt?” he asks.  
  
“No!” Ray looks offended that Brad might think 'fucker' could ever apply to Walt. “Trombley! Took my last fucking clean shirt.”  
  
The stain on Ray’s remaining uniform shirt looks like Bovril and covers the entire left side. Brad imagines one of Ray’s mess-mates—whoever lost that round of scissors paper stone—gathering up random articles of clothing after Ray’s accident (‘the beverage ordinance event’ Ray likes to call it) before dropping the whole bag at hospital. As much as it pains Brad to say it, Trombley is probably innocent here: not his fault Ray eats like a retarded hyena.  
  
“You’re welcome to one of mine.”  
  
Brad and Ray turn simultaneously toward the door.  
  
“I’d soak that one, though, if I were you,” Nate adds, “There’s washing powder in the kitchen: we may be able to save it yet.” Nate is wearing evening dress, complete with dinner jacket and bow tie; the somber color makes him look his true age. It also makes his eyes almost freakishly green. Brad’s only matched suit of civilian clothing came by mail from the Sears Roebuck Wishbook. By the time it arrived, he’d grown two more inches, so it was always too short; Nate’s is bespoke—has to be, the fit is too perfect for anything else.  
  
“Ray?” Walt calls from the entrance hall.  
  
Ray looks a little panicked. “Washing powder?”  
  
“In the tea canister by the back sink.”  
  
“Got it.” Ray dashes out of the room. Brad can hear him clattering down the stairs.  
  
“Can I, uh, help? With that?”  
  
“Hmm?” Brad follows Nate’s gaze to the tie, loose in his own hand. When he looks up, his host has stepped close enough to gently tug the fabric right out of his grasp.  
  
Nate doesn’t smell like lavender anymore, but Brad catches, faintly, some very expensive cologne. To manage the tie, Nate is, of course, looking at Brad’s face, and so Brad has the opportunity to watch him without being the focus of his attention. Nate has grey flecks in his irises and faint circles under his eyes. He bites his lower lip when he concentrates. His skin is winter pale. Suddenly, just as Brad is wondering if Nate freckles in the sun, he finds himself staring into the green-grey eyes. “Chin up,” Nate says quietly, and Brad lifts his chin. Nate’s fingers are cool and dry on his throat, centering the knot, smoothing the collar. “There,” Nate says, stepping back.  
  
Brad has to stop himself from taking a step forward to maintain proximity. There is a third thing, he is realizing...again, too late.

++++

The group that gathers for dinner a half-hour later is marked by a sort of raggedy luxury. Neither Brad nor Ray would meet the grooming standard, but between the two of them, they’ve managed the best parts of their respective uniforms. Walt wears an elaborately embroidered waistcoat (“my mother,” he explains, blushing to his hairline, when Em exclaims over it), paired with a suit far above any student’s paygrade. Brad suspects he borrowed it from Nate. Louisa’s party dress was made for a girl two year’s younger—the thousand pin-tucks were done by hand, but the skirt is two inches too short. For the second time, Brad is reminded of that old Sears suit. His heart twists a little when he sees the rest of the dress still fits: Louisa has lived nearly half her life in a nation at war and probably can’t even remember food before rationing. Brad didn’t have much, growing up, but one of his earliest memories is California oranges, glowing like small suns, in an orchard that stretched to the blue horizon. Em’s rose-coloured dress makes her skin look like porcelain. She has drawn lines down the back of her calves to imitate stockings. She brushes aside Brad’s compliments with a laugh: “For once I really can say ‘ _This old thing? I’ve had it for ages_.’”  
  
“I remember Mummy in that dress,” Louisa adds.  
  
“Goodness!” Em reaches over to fix Lou’s plaits, “That’s because _you_ have memory like an elephant!”  
  
Walt is unfamiliar with this phrase and so dinner had started with a conversation about strange English idioms.  
  
They eat in the formal dining room; “no kitchen?” Brad had asked when he’d seen Nate laying a fire in the dining room. “It’s Christmas,” Nate shrugged, “one must make an effort.” He had been totally serious. Again, Brad was struck by just how… _British_ it all was. He himself was not much for pretending that things were as good as they had been; “make-believe,” he’d once told Ray, “offends my warrior spirit.” He, too, had been serious. He worried that the dinner would be disheartening, a pathetic attempt to recreate a time that could never return…but there, he had underestimated the family Fick.  
  
The room was actually, miraculously, warm. A fir tree had been brought inside and decorated with old glass ornaments and folded paper flowers. The room smelled like evergreen and wood smoke. Beneath the vast mantelpiece, the fireplace blazed. Light bounced off the crystal and silver on the long dining table. If this had been a pre-war dinner party, the whole expansive table would have been laid for guests and the chandelier above it would have been lit. Instead, there were a few vast candelabra on the table and the mantelpiece. Rather than leave half the expansive dining table empty, the family had laid half of it and left the other half as a sideboard. This neatly obviated the need for butlers and footmen to serve the food and did away with empty place settings for people who were missing. The flickering candles created a sense of festive secrecy: a party while the grown-ups were gone, in a place the war would never find them.

++++

Walt had taken over the cooking—“please,” he’d insisted in his pretty-good English, “it is my very best pleasure!”—and had enlisted Ray as his sous-chef. They had locked themselves up in the kitchen all day; Brad had his doubts about letting Ray too close to edible food, but he’d been wrong. There were omelets for a starter instead of the interminable soup, and then roast vegetables and chicken. Walt, unfamiliar with the traditional goose-and-pudding menu, had not even tried to emulate it. Nate provided champagne (and a toast: “To absent friends, distant family, new allies, and our victorious peace.”) Everything was delicious.  
  
At last, the conversation would down and they stopped handing around the serving dishes. Louisa tries valiantly to finish one last tea-cake (Walt had flavored them with mint and Brad has already eaten more than his fair share) and Ray manfully offers to take care of it for her.  
  
Em is dreamily watching bubbles in her champagne goblet. “Wherever did you find this? It's fabulous.”  
  
“Lou discovered six bottles and some wine while digging about in the west cellar,” Nate replies. “The wine had turned to mud, but I thought we might as well enjoy the champagne. I’ve put aside two more bottles for New Years’—if that’s any incentive to stay, gents?” he glances at his guests.  
  
“Urgh,” says Ray, slumped comfortably in his chair. “I am never leaving again,” he vows. “I am going AWOL and signing up with your Ministry of Agriculture under an assumed name. Loan me a dress, Em? I’d be a great Land Girl.”  
  
Em is beautiful when she laughs. “God knows, you’re skinny enough to fit my dresses.”  
  
“Not anymore,” Walt teases, looking pointedly at Ray’s mauled plate.  
  
“And who’s fault is that?!” Ray shoots back.  
  
Brad catches a glimpse of Nate in the mirror over the mantelpiece. He looks perfectly content, watching his friends and family, fed and laughing.  
  
“Two for Christmas, two for New Year’s,” Brad comments, “that still leaves you with two more bottles.”  
  
“Oh, I’m saving those for the armistice. Someday,” Nate says firmly, “someday, this war will be over.”

++++

The hall clock chimes half-past ten and Nate starts to gather up plates and silverware. “I’ll do the washing up.”  
  
“D’you think there’ll be snow?” Lou asks suddenly.  
  
“Hard frost, maybe. And I’ve used up all our gas ration getting your outrageous sister home with all her London parcels, so you’d best dress warmly.”  
  
“If you disapprove of my London parcels, Nate,” Em taunts him, “I’ll just take your right back to London with me.”  
  
“Can’t we take Victor?”  
  
“Victor, God love him, would steer you right off the road, Lou. You know he’s practically blind on one side. Honestly, I should send him to the glue-factory,” Nate announces and Brad knows from Lou’s horrified squeals that this is a frequent threat that will never be acted upon. “Boots! Hat, mittens, coat! Go on!” Nate chivvies her, laughing, out of the dining room and up the stairs.  
  
“There’s a midnight service at the church in the village,” Em explains, collecting wine glasses. “Lessons and Carols. They shut it down last year because it broke the blackout, but our vicar is rather traditional about these things and has got it started up again, if anyone feels up to a bit of a walk.”  
  
“Oh, actually, Brad’s—” Ray starts, but Brad elbows him (hard) with his plaster elbow.  
  
“Not religious,” Brad finishes smoothly.  
  
“I’ll go,” Walt offers.  
  
“You won’t even know the words!”  
  
Walt is not at all concerned by Ray’s objections. “I will hum!” he declares reprovingly. “With comfort and joy! Or,” he sneaks a look over at Ray, “you can teach me the words. These are our choices.”  
  
Ray lets out a burdened sigh, like he’s just been asked to single-handedly defeat the Nazis. “Fine. Let me get my coat or I’ll freeze my balls off. Uh, sorry, Em.”  
  
Brad is not sure what surprises him more: Ray cleaning up his language for a lady, or Ray voluntarily offering to go out in public. He hasn’t commented on it—he’s not gonna fucking hold Ray’s hand—but he has noticed that, since he was burned, Ray prefers not to spend time with civilians. They invariably stare and whisper and Ray’s a paranoid fucker. For some reason, first Lou, and then Walt, Em, and Nate had become exempt from Ray’s no-civilians policy. Now it looks like that circle is going to be expanded again. At a church service. It must, Brad thinks wryly, be a Christmas miracle.

Brad and Nate are silently washing dishes in the kitchen when Lou and Em appear in the doorway. They have changed into walking clothes and layers of wool.  
  
“Uh, Nate?” Lou waves him over, like she’d prefer not to be overheard. Brad hears her anyway. “Will you check? At midnight?”  
  
A concerned look flashes between Nate and Em. Em shrugs. “Of course I will, darling,” Nate says.  
  
“Do you promise?”  
  
“My word is my bond,” he says, formally. They shake on it and then Nate gently tucks her hair under her hood. “Now go on. Don’t forget to bring one of the torches.”  
  
“What was that about?” Brad asks when the walking party has left. The concerned crease hasn’t left Nate’s forehead.  
  
“What? Oh! My, uh, my brother—years ago Robert told Lou the story about the animals kneeling to welcome the Christ child at midnight on Christmas Eve…it’s an old legend around this area. Lou used to try and wait up every Christmas to actually see it. But, of course, she fell asleep every year. Not that there would be anything to see: it’s just a story,” Nate looks embarrassed to even be retelling it. “And since Robert was, uhm, since we got the news of his death, Lou’s been rather obsessed with it. Em thought taking her to midnight service might distract her…”  
  
“But it didn’t?”  
  
“Evidently not.”  
  
There is a moment of silence while Nate tries to dry the nooks of a cut-glass bowl.  
  
“What will you do?”  
  
“I’ll go out to the barn at midnight,” he says, like that should be obvious.  
  
“But you don’t…er, do you really think…?”  
  
“Of course not. There’s nothing to see. But I promised.”  
  
Nate is actually asleep at a quarter to midnight. Brad hears the clock chime and looks up from his book; in the wing chair across from him, his host’s head has dropped to his chest. For a moment, Brad considers just letting him sleep. Then he hauls himself out of the chair and crosses the fire-lit carpet.  
  
“Nate?” He puts a hand on Nate’s shoulder, shakes gently.  
  
“Nmmmgh,” Nate groans, exactly the exhausted sound Ray makes at reveille when the pain has kept him up most of the night. He turns his face into Brad’s arm for a moment; Brad can feel the faint stubble on his jaw against the back of his own hand. And then Nate is awake: suddenly and completely, out of a deep sleep. Brad thinks, again, that Tangmere is lucky to have him as air raid warden.  
  
“It’s almost midnight.” Brad whispers, even though he doesn’t need to.  
  
“Oh. Oh, thanks,” Nate stretches, long and dark in his suit. He looks at Brad, studying. “Do you want to come?”  
  
Brad shrugs. “Okay.”  
  
They put a guard on the fire and pull sweaters and wellies over their clothes. Nate carries a torch, but leaves it off. The night is sparklingly cold. Above them, there is a nearly full moon in the high vault of the sky. Their feet crunch on the frozen grass. Brad thinks about bombing runs.  
  
When the reach the barn, barely in view of the house, Nate flicks on the light to undo the vast iron hinge on the door and they step into a warm, musty space. The windows have been boarded up to stop drafts and it takes Brad’s eyes a moment to become accustomed to the thin light of the torch. He sees a hutch for rabbits, the sleepy lump of the lone cow. Victor shuffles in his stall and Nate strokes the horse’s nose. “Good boy, Vic,” he soothes.  
  
They stand in silence. Somewhere, a beam cracks in the cold. Brad checks his wristwatch: three minutes past twelve. “It’s after midnight.”  
  
Nate turns to him, rises a little on his toes, and kisses him. Hard. Brad is so surprised he brings a hand up to Nate’s cheek. Nate’s face is cold, but his mouth is very, very warm. Just when Brad is getting dizzy for lack of oxygen, Nate pulls back and smiles, mouth red and crooked. “Happy Christmas.”

++++

Brad stares stupidly, but only for a moment. Then he pushes Nate back against the barn door hard enough for the wood to creak and opens his mouth with his tongue.  
  
They stumble back into the house, their breath steaming, struggling out of boots and scarves. On the landing of the staircase, Nate gets Brad up against the wall and works a hand into his pants.  
  
“Jesus Christ!” Brad yelps, nearly biting Nate's tongue. “Your fingers are freezing!”  
  
“Fine, then.” The smirk on Nate’s face could only be described as wicked: “Warm me up?” He turns and scrambles up the stairs. Lithe and quicker than Brad expects, he almost reaches the top gallery, before Brad catches him and pulls him down, half on the landing, half on the stairs.  
  
Nate struggles halfheartedly: he’s out of breath with laughing and Brad is bigger. In fact, Brad lays over him, a solid, breathing weight, and lets him appreciate how much bigger for a moment before working his way down Nate’s body. With his casted arm pinning Nate down, Brad uses his good hand to undo Nate’s trousers. When he reaches Nate’s cock, hard and red, both hands are occupied—so, in the spirit of making do, he uses his mouth.  
  
When Brad first gets the swollen head into his mouth, Nate arches up so much Brad thinks he is going to levitate right off the stairs. “Oh, my God,” Nate hisses, his hand coming down to tangle in Brad’s hair. Brad manages another few inches, his tongue teasing the crown and the knot of nerves below it, before his throat closes. He pulls off, wiping his eyes, and sees that Nate, twisting and squirming with his fist in his mouth, has managed to pull aside one of the blackout curtains that usually cover the landing windows. Moonlight pours over them, cold and bone-white. Almost involuntarily, Brad draws the fingers of his casted hand down Nate’s body. Those fingers, perhaps because they’ve been restricted for so long, seem more attuned to the tiny ripple and shift of muscle beneath skin. Brad has a brief, crazy image of himself asking Doc whether this is a normal reaction to surgery.  
  
Chest, belly, hips—Nate’s skin in the moonlight is almost as pale as his white dress shirt, and both skin and clothing practically glow against the dark wood of the stairs. Brad pulls Nate’s hand away from his mouth. “Don’t,” he says. “There’s no one here but us.”  
  
“Too much,” Nate mutters, rough and low, tossing his head. His hips move restlessly, rocking into Brad’s. And that’s the moment when Brad decides he is going to take every inch of Nate’s cock, and then make Nate take every inch of his own.

It takes some time: Nate is long, and Brad hasn’t done this in a while. Twice, he stops to bat Nate’s hand away from his mouth. After that, Nate seems to get the message, so Brad can devote his own hands to other, more interesting things…Nate’s nipples, for instance, and the space behind his knee or the soft, folded skin on his balls. Nate is still quiet, though: faint whimpers and breathed words while Brad sputters and curses. On his fourth try, Brad—eyes streaming, but so _close_ —unexpectedly pictures a younger Nate with some other, faceless boy, tangled in a narrow bed at one of those boarding schools, trying not to wake the rest of the dormitory. The image makes him groan, throat opening at just the moment Nate rolls his hips, and suddenly, Brad is _there_ , his throat impossibly full, his nose pressed to the fine hairs on Nate’s stomach. He panics for a second— _can’t breathe!—_ before he becomes aware of Nate’s hand carding soothingly through his hair.  
  
“I didn’t think…” Nate sounds dazed. “I couldn’t…”

Brad swallows and Nate is reduced to single words: “I, uh…oh! You—” Nate strokes Brad’s cheek, cups his jaw as though trying to feel himself through Brad’s body. Brad swallows again and shifts the hand that has been playing with Nate’s balls further down, through the spit and pre-cum, to thumb at his opening. Then the words go away: there is only a stifled, keening moan as Nate comes totally apart.  
  
They are still sprawled on the landing, Brad’s knees on the stairs, ten minutes later when the clock chimes one. Brad’s desire to fuck Nate through the floor has abated slightly. So he’s been occupying himself sucking a bruise onto the flat skin below Nate’s ribcage while Nate trembles through aftershocks. The chimes die away, and Brad hears the crunch of tyres on gravel.  
  
“Must’ve…gotten a ride,” Nate’s voice is thick and slurred. “From the church. Should go meet them in the forecourt…”  
  
Brad studies Nate in the moonlight. His shirt is crumpled, unbuttoned, and pushed up to his collarbone; his nipples are puckered and red enough that Brad suspects Nate played with them while Brad’s own hands were busy elsewhere. (Brad files that information away for future use). Above the wrecked collar, Nate’s face is flushed even in the cold house, his hair sticking up where he’s run his hand through it. Nate blinks sleepily and smiles up; his bottom lip is swollen and bitten.  
  
“I’ll take care of them,” Brad assures him.  
  
“No, no,” Nate pulls himself up to sit, trying to find words. “I, uh…”  
  
“I’ll take care of them,” Brad says again, dipping to lick that lower lip, “and then,” he punctuates with a kiss, wondering if Nate can taste himself. “And then, I’m going to take care of you. Okay?”  
  
Nate bites his lip. “Okay.”  
  
It was completely the right decision, Brad knows, when Nate slowly gathers himself and his remaining clothes and moves down the gallery toward the bedrooms. There is something loose and relaxed, almost sluttish, about his walk. There is absolutely no concealing what he’s been up to.

++++

A car pulls into the court just as Brad reaches the front door. It’s an old 1937 touring car with the coloured lamps that denote a country doctor, for whom wartime gas rations are relaxed slightly. He pauses for a moment, still half-hard, to press his hot face against the pane of cool glass in the door before going out to meet it. The moon has moved behind the house, so the drive is shadowed. If anyone notices that Brad is a little short of breath, they don't comment. Walt hands a just-wakened Louisa out to Brad, then clambers out himself, followed by Ray and Em, who ducks back to thank the driver and his copilot—Brad thinks it’s the vicar as well as the local doctor, and congratulates himself on not letting Nate out of the house.  
  
Walt goes to see to the heaters in the barn and Brad sends Ray off to permanently bank the fire in the library. Em runs ahead to straighten the blackout curtains on the landing. Brad is left to steer Lou up the stairs, half-carrying her with his good arm. She’s actually rather light: too many years of too little food.  
  
“D’ja go to the barn?” she mumbles into Brad’s arm as they turn the gallery landing.  
  
“Of course,” Brad says, guiding her into her room.  
  
“At midnight?” Lou asks, more than half-asleep. Her eyes are still closed as Brad unlaces her boots and pulls her blankets over her, clothes and all. “Did you see…?”  
  
Brad pairs the boots—each one the size of his hand—at the foot of her bed so he doesn’t have to look at her. “It was just like Robbie told you,” he lies smoothly.  
  
“Knew it. Knew it would be,” Lou mutters, satisfied.  
  
In the hallway, Brad wishes Em a happy Christmas and Ray a good night as they go to their bedrooms. Then he goes to his own.  
  
When he opens the door, he is temporarily blinded. Nate has taken down all the blackout curtains and the moon, having moved west, is blazing through the triple windows and reflecting off the mirrored wardrobe door that Brad left open before dinner. He closes his eyes to get his night-vision back and he can sense Nate moving behind him.  
  
“As fond as I am of this tie,” Nate whispers, his breath hot in Brad’s ear, “it has to go. As does the rest of your clothing.”  
  
Nate, naked and warm against Brad’s back, unpicks the knot of the tie and starts on the buttons of the shirt. Brad doesn’t even open his eyes until Nate starts easing the shirt-sleeve over his cast. When he does, he almost has to close them again. They are both partially visible in the wardrobe mirror: Brad half out of his uniform, Nate resting his chin on Brad’s shoulder, meeting his eyes in the mirror.  
  
“How do you want to—?” Brad starts, suddenly awkward. It has been a long time.  
  
“No hurry,” Nate’s mouth works its way down from Brad’s ear to the curve of his jaw, his throat, his shoulder. “I am in no hurry at all.”

                                                                                                                                  ++++

After that, though, things seem to move very quickly. One minute, they are standing in front of the mirror, Nate rubbing gently against Brad’s back. The next, Nate has done away with the remainder of Brad’s uniform and is tumbling him into the huge, lavender-scented bed. It seems to be Nate’s mission in life to learn every inch of Brad—every muscle and scar—by touch and tongue. His movements are deliberate, confident: there was a tension in farmer Fick that Brad didn’t even notice until it is gone. When he straddles Brad’s hips, he knows exactly what he’s doing.  
  
“Are you sure you…” Brad starts, but Nate kisses the next words right out of his mouth.  
  
“With your arm? We’re doing it this way.” Brad doesn’t even think about arguing. Nate nips at Brad’s bottom lip, rocking himself against Brad’s stomach until Brad has to grab his hips or explode. The crest of Nate’s hip is already scraped from before, from twisting beneath the rough plaster of Brad’s cast, and Nate hisses when Brad’s palm hit it. He also grows—if possible—even harder. (Another detail Brad tucks away for future reference). Brad runs his bad hand up over Nate’s ribs. When he his fingers find a nipple, tight from cold and arousal, Nate growls and pushes into the touch. Brad’s other hand slides from hip to ass. His fingers come away slick with something thicker than the pre-cum all over his stomach and Nate’s thighs. He makes a quizzical sound against Nate’s mouth.  
  
“Don’t laugh,” Nate cautions.  
  
Brad barely has enough oxygen available to speak, never mind laugh. “Had to make do?”  
  
“Oleo,” Nate pants.  
  
For an instant, Brad has no idea what he’s talking about…and then he remembers oleomargarine is being marketed as a substitute for butter (which is, of course, rationed). He vaguely remembers hearing the icebox close while he was struggling, one-handed, to shed his borrowed wellies after they dashed back from the barn. He doesn’t laugh. He considers how long and how well Nate has had this planned, and then he pictures Nate in this bed, preparing himself—opening himself—for Brad. All the blood in his body rushes immediately to his cock, so quickly that for a brief moment, Brad honestly thinks he’s going to pass out. “Oh, _fuuuck_ ,” he breathes.

Even with the oleo, even as slick as they are with sweat and saliva and pre-cum, there is a moment when Brad doesn’t think it’s going to work. Nate, bracing himself on Brad’s shoulders, is just too tight. Brad is now intimately familiar with the long, smooth muscles of Nate’s thighs and shoulders, the sort of working muscles developed tilling fields with volunteers from the Ministry of Agriculture.Nevertheless, Brad is still bigger and Nate hasn’t spent the last sixth months training to fly USAAF bombers. With his pale, freckled skin, with his hips that fit so exactly in the palms of Brad’s hand, he suddenly seems impossibly fragile.  
  
“Look,” Brad manages, “we can—”  
  
“Shut _up_!” Nate says, his forehead knitted in concentration. Then he does something—rolls his hips some subtle, liquid way—and the concentration melts into wonder. The crown of Brad’s cock slides into such warmth that the rest of his over-heated body goes cold in comparison.  
  
Nate works his way down, slow but determined —Brad remembers why this is called _screwing_ —and Brad can’t look away from his face: focus, confusion, marvel, pain, delight flash and alternate. And that’s all before his ass comes to rest in the hollow of Brad’s hips.  
  
“Oh, my _God_ ,” Brad moans weakly. Nate rises over him, almost radiant in the light, like some impossible, pornographic vision. But all of Brad's other sense—touch, taste, sound, smell—prove that he is definitely corporeal. Nate still smells a little like cologne and cold air, but his skin is warm and salty against Brad’s mouth.Brad tries to remember that Nate’s sisters—and his own retarded subordinate—are within shouting distance; he meditates on his commanders back at Tangmere, about Ray eating fish and chips, about any unpleasant distraction from the incredible pressure and warmth and shift of tightening muscles. There is no way he is going to make this last, not with Nate right in front of him, head thrown back, ass flexing, hand working at his cock.  
  
Brad plants his feet on the bed and arches up, trying to give Nate the _more_ and _harder_ he keeps demanding in those breathy, dizzying commands.  
  
“I can’t—” Brad tries to say, “I can’t…”  
  
“Yes, you can,” Nate is breathless, now, too, leaning in for a sloppy kiss, leaning back in a way that makes him go even _tighter_ around Brad. He grabs Brad’s hand and pulls it to him. “You can, yes, yes…”  
  
With his hand on Nate’s stomach, Brad can feel all the muscles there grasping and clenching rhythmically, inside and out. It’s an almost too-intense, doubled sensation. He and Nate come in nearly the same instant, shuddering and twisting, intertwined with each other, Brad’s hand on Nate’s abdomen, Nate’s fingers in Brad’s mouth. Brad sucks on those fingers like he’ll never let them go—the only way he manages not to wake the house, shouting. Nate comes in total silence, an almost beatific expression on his upturned face.

++++

Brad wakes up, aching pleasantly, at 5:00 out of habit: that’s when they sound reveille at Tangmere. The moon is down and the sun not yet risen, but there is a dim gray half-light coming through the undressed windows. The curtains and blackout material are piled in a corner. Nate’s clothes are neatly folded on the chair by the dying fire; Brad’s are strewn around the wardrobe. Next to him in the bed (large enough for both of them, which makes Brad rethink his low opinion of British engineering), Nate sleeps on his stomach, his head pillowed on his arms. From what Brad can see, he’s a little worse for the wear: a few bites and bruises, a long scrape from Brad’s cast.

They’d gone at it two or three times that Brad can remember; Nate has every right to be exhausted. Brad pulls the blanket up to cover Nate’s naked back, adds one quick kiss to his bare shoulder.  
  
“Mmmnn,” Nate mumbles, and then turns to peek sleepily over his arm. “G'morning.”  
  
“Hi,” Brad replies. He decides he may as well leave his hand on the small of Nate’s back, now that he doesn’t have to worry about waking him. Nate obligingly shifts into it, his cheek against Brad’s shoulder. It’s not _cuddling_ of course. Just makes it easier to talk without waking everyone else. One must make do.  
  
Nate idly traces the skin above Brad’s cast until Brad has to pull his arm away. “Tickles.”  
  
“Did it happen flying? Your arm, I mean.”  
  
“Happened landing, actually.”  
  
Nate smiles lazily, conceding the point. His eyelids flutter closed. “How did you end up flying airplanes, anyway?”  
  
“Well, it was either that or join the Marines.” It’s Brad’s standard answer and, for a moment, he thinks he’s going to get away with it. But then Nate’s eyes open and he says, “No, seriously.”  
  
Brad has been asked a variation on that question by perhaps one hundred different people, but Nate is the first one to ever ask for more of an explanation.  
  
“I saw a crop-duster over an almond orchard in the San Joaquin Valley when I was eight. It was a little Curtiss Jenny—army surplus biplane from the _last_ war, beat all to hell, probably less than 120 horsepower in the engine. But it just looked like…” Brad pauses to consider exactly how to describe the effect of the Jenny on a gangly kid who had never been higher than the roof of the neighbors’ barn. “Freedom. It looked like freedom, to me.”  
  
Nate doesn’t say anything, but his attention never waivers, so Brad ends up telling him how the only son of a California housebuilder had ended up stationed in England, flying for the US Army Air Force. By the time he’s finished, they can hear Lou trying to be quiet on the stairs as she sneaks down to the library. Brad doesn’t get a chance to ask Nate much about his own background, his memories of what Tangmere was like before the RAF bought it up, his opinions on the war. After all, he’s seen the man’s childhood home, met his family, talked to his associates…Brad figures he has a pretty good handle on Nate Fick. Later, he will come to regret not asking more questions.

Nate stretches, so luxurious and cat-like that Brad _has_ to run a hand down his back. Nate obligingly arches up for a kiss  
  
“Can’t. Sore,” he mumbles into Brad’s mouth when one exploring hand cups the cheek of his ass. Brad should not find that as hot as he does. However, given the way said ass is flexing under his hand, he suspects Nate finds the idea of being so fucking _used_ a little hot himself. Brad sits up for a moment to better appreciate the intoxicating sight of his debauched bed-mate rocking leisurely against the rumpled sheets. Then he smacks Nate’s delicious ass, gets one hand around his waist, and hauls him closer.  
  
Nate is not small, but sitting practically on Brad’s lap—manhandled so he straddles Brad’s left thigh, his back against Brad’s side while Brad leans into the pillows—he seems oddly fragile. He’s been burning more calories than he’s been taking in for years; rationing has left nothing but hard-won muscle and bone. Brad can easily wrap his casted arm around Nate’s waist and hold him snugly.

Six weeks in hospital and Brad has seen all he cares to of scars and stitches and burns; he can’t get enough of Nate’s ridiculously flawless skin. He is reminded of his mother’s bone china, the delicate stuff that glowed when you held it up to the light.He circles the fingers of his good hand around the small bones of Nate’s wrist, explores the curve of his hip, tips Nate’s jaw until he can stroke the long column of his throat. He finds an inoculation scar, a blister on one heel. Brad’s hands look huge against Nate's body, rough against that unspoiled skin.  
  
“Spit,” Brad says, finally, holding out his palm. Nate does him one better: starting with the thumb, he devours Brad’s right hand, one digit at a time, stroking each one with his tongue. He offers a few nips and licks to Brad’s palm—the cat comparison floats again briefly into Brad’s dazed mind. By the time he reaches Brad’s little finger, Brad is shamelessly rubbing against Nate’s ass where he holds him down.  
  
“Better than oleo,” Brad growls and Nate laughs breathlessly. The laugh turns into a choked moan when Brad curls that hand around Nate’s balls. He relaxes his left arm a little, lets Nate shift his hips and push up into Brad’s grip until he starts to get a feeling for the long, slow, teasing strokes Nate prefers. Then he pins Nate against his own body and gives him just what he wants.  
  
They are reflected in the mirror on open wardrobe door, Nate sprawled against Brad, both of them utterly disheveled. Nate squirms, but he can’t get quite enough leverage, so he is at Brad’s mercy. He grips Brad’s thigh: there will be bruises.  
  
“Look at you,” Brad breathes into his ear, marveling. “You’re so fucking gorgeous…and you want it _so bad_ , don’t you? Want it _more_? More and harder…”  
  
Nate turns his face into Brad’s neck, suddenly shy, but Brad can feel the blush travel down his body.Brad’s right hand, wringing the pre-cum out of Nate’s cock, speeds up even as the thumb of his left hand brushes slow and comforting against Nate’s belly. Brad only wishes he had a free hand to turn Nate’s head until he couldn’t help but see his reflection, see how perfect and desperate he looks.  
  
“You want it?” Brad whispers soothingly, and he feels Nate mouthing wetly at his throat, though no sound comes out. “Yeah, I know,” Brad coaxes, “I know you do. So do I. I want to see you come.” Even through his cast, he can feel the muscles in Nate’s hips and thighs working. Nate’s fingers come up unconsciously to pull at his own nipples.Mindless stimulation: he’s already so far gone.“Would you do that for me?” Nate whimpers. Brad thumbs the crown of his cock and put his lips against the shell of Nate’s ear: “Please?”  
  
Nate comes _hard_ —his whole body jerking in deep contractions that leave him splayed out and shuddering in Brad’s arms, both of them slick with sweat and cum.  
  
“Holy _God_ ,” he stammers, finally, flushed and shivering. “Jesus _Christ_ ,” His head drops heavily onto Brad’s shoulder.  
  
Brad presses a kiss half on his forehead, half in his sweat-damp hair. “Actually, I’m Jewish.”

Nate gawps, still winded. “You have been listening to us chatter about Christmas for two days and you didn’t think to mention this detail?”  
  
“You didn’t _chatter_ ,” Brad can’t imagine Nate chattering. “Anyway, it didn’t seem relevant.”  
  
Nate just shakes his head. “Didn’t seem relevant,” he mutters to himself. His fingers trace Brad’s cock like he’s just noticing the circumcision…maybe he is: their minds have been on other things. He snuffles a laugh when Brad’s hips come off the bed. He slides off Brad’s, still endearingly uncoordinated, and settles between his legs. His mouth replaces his fingers.

“Please,”Brad grits out, “ _please_ tell me you didn’t learn this at boarding school.”

“Nooo,”Nate breathes on Brad’s cock.“University, on the other hand…”He looks up innocently through his lashes and his fringe.They are late to breakfast.

                                                                                                                                   ++++  
  
Eventually, they do wander down to join the others in the kitchen—Brad deliberately lagging a few minutes behind Nate, so they are not seen to arrive together. (Ray is an intuitive bastard, and he has a filthy fucking mind). They shouldn’t have worried. Ray is in the kitchen trying to inculcate the non-Americans into the glory of pancakes. Lou, who had been expecting the sort of crepe-type things served on Shrove Tuesday, is puzzled: “But, it’s not Pancake day!”  
  
“What?! You only have pancakes one day out of the year? Brad! Brad—did you hear that? No wonder we won the Revolutionary War!”  
  
“You peasant farmers were fortified with pancakes?” Em asks archly, playing lady of the manor. “Was that before or after you upstarts displaced the natives and butchered the language of Shakespeare?”  
  
“Who are you calling a peasant farmer?!” Ray demands, but he’s grinning, never happier than when in an argument. Brad notices that Walt is the one making sure the pancakes don’t burn. Ray commandeers most of the silverware to construct a field model of the Battle of Yorktown, and he seems so knowledgeable about the subject that Brad can’t quite tell how much he’s bullshitting.  
  
Almost immediately after breakfast, Brad learns that there is nothing to do at Mathilda when the farm is not fully operational. Walt and Em (helped and/or hindered by Ray and Lou) have already milked the cow and fed the chickens and…there’s not much else. There are no Christmas geese to be had, of course, so Em puts in chickens to roast for dinner and for the Boxing Day tea. Nate really has no idea when any of the farm staff will be returning—“They should be back by the 27th, but with so many soldiers on holiday leave, the trains will probably be jammed. I am assured of this.” Trains or no trains, war or no war, Aunt Agatha Fick will put in an appearance, as she does every year on New Year’s Eve. At the mention of that name, Lou makes a face over her knitting and Nate pretends not to notice.  
  
Before long, Walt is prevailed upon to chop vegetables and Ray tags along to keep him company. Brad is exempt by virtue of having only one good arm; however, he does have two perfectly functional legs, and so when Nate suggests a walk, Brad agrees. Lou says she’ll stay behind to finish her balaclava (and, Brad suspects, more closely examine the presents under the tree).  
  
They eschew the road and walk out over the fields instead. Two hours ago, Brad would have sworn that he’d have Nate out of his clothing the moment they were alone—forget the freezing weather and the possibility of splinters. Somehow, though, they just end up walking: miles over the grey-brown fields, with nothing to see but more fields and the frozen sky. It should be intolerable, but it’s not. Nate tells him little bits of local history—glaciers, Romans. Somewhere in the third mile, Brad starts talking…about California, about flying and how much he misses it…he talks until he has nothing left to say, and then they walk in silence. By the time they return, Mathilda is sinking into early dusk. The house lights are on in the kitchen;soon it will be time to pull the blackout curtains. Brad can hear Ray talking before they even cross into the dooryard. Brad suddenly throws out his arms and runs, reveling in the speed, the cold air on his face, in the spread and strength of his arms, cast and all.  
  
“What the hell is this?!” he hears Ray say from the doorway.  
  
Nate smiles calmly. “Just happy, I suppose.”

They open presents in the library, after dinner. The family Fick has chipped in to create care-package style presents for their guests: snacks, cigarettes, new razor blades, a pair of handknit socks, and carefully rolled ball of Lou’s scavenged yarn. (Brad will carry that yarn all over Europe in his pack; whatever second-hand sweater Lou had dismantled had first been washed at Mathilda: the yarn smells like lavender). The items are so perfectly suited to the exact needs of soldiers—a housewife with darning needles and bear-cotton thread instead of the regular sort that won’t hold a uniform together, for instance—that Brad is kind of amazed civilians thought of them.  
  
Brad and Ray had pooled their resources to buy gifts, wrapping them in out-dated newspaper (Brad slipped Ray his own present earlier: a magazine that would perhaps not be appropriate in a family gathering). Nate receives a crossword puzzle book, closely printed on cheap, thin wartime paper, and a better quality, pre-war copy of _The Grapes of Wrath_ , which Brad has discovered being used to shim up a window sash the Tangmere pub and bought for more than it was worth. For the girls, Ray’s connection in Tangmere provided stockings and squares of parachute silk. Silk of any sort, and particularly for stockings, has been virtually unavailable for years. Most women had been reduced to drawing stocking seams on top of leg make-up. Brad figured Em’s nursing course in London was back-breaking and thankless, at least if it was anything like the nursing sisters who staffed the infirmary at Tangmere; she was due a little luxury. (Ray had supported this decision: “Buddy, if we could just work out some way to keep the ladies happy, we wouldn’t never have any wars. Wars happen ‘cause there’s too much bullshit and not enough pussy! I mean, look at Hitler. Do you think he gets any pussy? I think not, my friend. If he did, maybe he wouldn’t be so batshit insane. Hey! Do you think anyone has mentioned this to FDR? Maybe I should go tell him…”). Brad hadn’t been sure about giving Lou silk stockings—they seemed kind of…well, grown up—but Ray had said you _always_ give sisters the same thing, and then waxed into fond memories about twins he’d known back in Kentucky…  
  
Walt has excused himself to bring tea from the kitchen when Lou actually opens her present, but Brad figures he knows all about it because the girl shrieks like an air raid siren.  
  
“Oh, they’re _gorgeous_!” Lou squeals, dancing her stockings around the room and throwing her arms around Ray.  
  
“Might not fit,” Brad demurs, trying to avoid a hug of his own.  
  
“I’ll grow into them!” Lou is not to be denied. “Em says I’m growing like a weed. I feel older already.” She swirls her length of silk around her like a cape. “Em, will you make mine into a skirt?”  
  
“Make your own skirt!” Em teases, stroking her own fabric. “I’m busy…Brad, Ray, it’s lovely!”  
  
“You know I can’t sew with anything this nice. But _you_ could sew me something to wear for my birthday—it’s in February,” Lou explains in an aside to Brad before returning to plead with Em, “and you would be my best, favorite sister! Nate, tell Em to make me something I can wear with my new stockings…”  
  
“Nate?” Lou falters when she turns to look at her brother, and when Brad turns to follow her gaze, he can see why.  
  
Nate’s expression is beyond ‘annoyed,’ but ‘angry’ is not quite the right descriptor. The expression on his face is a mix of fury and disappointment; he looks like he has been betrayed, and like he blames himself for not seeing it earlier.  
  
“You will never,” he says, calm and icy, “wear that material in this house.”

“But _Nate_ —” Lou knows the teasing is over; she sounds honestly shocked.  
  
“All of this,” Nate picks distastefully at the bright silk Lou left spread on the library chaise longue, “by rights, belongs to the military that is currently defending us—at great cost, I might add—defending us from invasion—”  
  
“Oh, honestly, Nate, it’s a _gift,_ ” Em begins. Brad shares her surprise: the Fick household is rule-abiding—most Britons are, for all the good-natured complaints about rationing—but everyone cheats a little bit. The doctor uses his gas ration to bring parishioners home on cold nights; civilian suppliers skim C rations; everyone gets a little something on the black market. No one is really idealistic enough to believe everyone plays by the rules all the time. Except, it seems, Nate Fick.  
  
“It is a shame,” Nate corrects, firmly, “And a disgrace.” His expression is utterly serious, and then it cracks a little and becomes, simply, tired. “We live in a country that will only survive is we are willing to make sacrifices across the board. Having certain…connections,” –Brad goes cold; not even _friends?_ –“does not exempt us from that.”  
  
Nate turns to Brad. “I’m sure you didn’t mean anything by it, but I hope you understand that we can’t accept the gifts…”  
  
“Look,” Ray interrupts, “you could just let your sisters enjoy the stuff and look the other—”  
  
The thin rein controlling Nate’s temper snaps. “Corporal, when I am speaking to your colleague, you do _not_ need to be talking unless you are spoken to. And nobody fucking spoke to you!”  
  
“Uh, yes, sir,” Ray stutters, responding to the tone of command in Nate’s voice before he can even process the words.  
  
Brad doesn’t know where or how Ray’s connection acquired the silk, although it _is_ almost certainly black market. He doesn’t know if he should feel responsible for that, or if he should be indignant about their nice—and expensive—gesture being unappreciated. He only knows that he, Brad Colbert, has been publicly embarrassed. His honor as a warrior has been insulted, and he will not tolerate that. He stands up and steps closer to Nate...who refuses to back down. For a moment, they glare at each other.  
  
“I will never,” Brad says, and his tone is at least as cold as Nate’s, “ _never_ need to be lectured about patriotism and sacrifice by a perfectly healthy man who chooses to spend his days playing Old MacDonald in the company of women and children.”  
  
He nearly collides with Walt and a set of teacups on the way out of the library. As he makes his way up the stairs, he hears the Pole behind him.  
  
“What is happened?”  
  
“Oh,” Ray must have followed him out of the library, “Mommy and Daddy just had a little disagreement. But don’t worry; it doesn’t mean they love us any less.” In the echoing entry hall, Ray's joke is not funny at all.

++++

The next days are agonizing. Lou sulks, upset at Nate for being so _Nate_ , at Em for not defending her, at Brad and Ray for getting her into trouble. Em is annoyed with Nate (she is an adult and hardly needs her older brother minding her morals) and Lou (for sulking). Walt is puzzled. Ray is impatient with Walt’s confusion and with what he perceives as Brad’s stubborn refusal to apologize (“Buddy, guys get nuts about their sisters. Just say you’re sorry. You don’t have to fucking _mean_ it”), because as much as Ray enjoys fomenting dissent, he doesn’t actually like it when people are mad at each other. Brad furious with Nate for having such a stick up his ass (and disgusted with himself for the amount of time he spends thinking about that ass). Worse, he suspects Nate may (technically) be right. He is only mildly mad at Ray (no more than usual, really), until he hears that Ray thinks he should apologize, and then he kind of calls Ray a fickle cocksucker and that’s just another person to be angry at, and to have angry at him.  
  
The all basically spend the next few days trying to see as little of each other as possible. Brad walks a lot and reads even more. Ray takes the wireless apart and puts it back together. Em leaves the library or the kitchen whenever anyone else enters it. Brad doesn’t know what Nate does. And he doesn’t care.  
  
All of these disagreements are forged before Aunt Agatha turns up, and that’s when the week really goes to hell. Aunt Agatha is exactly as bad as every great-aunt Brad has ever heard of or read about. Up until Christmas, he had slowly been coming around to the idea that close relatives might not actually be fun-quashing moralists who lived to restrict him…but Aunt A. makes him revert to his original, negative opinion. She arrives (late) for luncheon and manages to insult three recently-returned farm-workers; Em’s cooking; the state of the garden; Nate’s politics; Louisa’s education, femininity, and conduct; and Walt’s nationality all before starting the soup (which, she alternately complains, is bland and too hot).  
  
She greets Ray with, “Oh, dear, whatever happened to your face?”  
  
Ray is, for the first time in recorded history, struck dumb. The blush rising on his cheeks, unfortunately, only makes the white scars stand out more.  
  
“I mean that ugly scarring,” Aunt Agatha continues. “Nathaniel, I hope you’re not afraid to join the war effort for fear of a _deformity_ …although, I must say, you always have been the most attractive of my nieces and nephews. Emmaline, darling, has anyone ever told you that if only you had Nathaniel’s coloring, you’d be quite a beauty?”  
  
“Only you, Aunt,” Em seethes over her soup.  
  
“Well, it’s quite true. I’m afraid there’s not much hope for poor Louisa, but _you_ at least might still marry well. Nathaniel, why don’t you ever bring home any appropriate friends to meet your sister?”  
  
Brad decides that being considered ‘inappropriate’ by Aunt Agatha is probably the highest compliment she can pay him.  
  
“Many of my friends are currently indisposed to courting,” Nate says tightly.  
  
“That reminds me,” Aunt Agatha forges ahead, “why are you here?”  
  
“I’m afraid I don’t understand the question, Aunt Agatha,” Nate says, but he sounds like he knows what is coming.  
  
“I mean, don’t you feel rather ashamed of yourself, living comfortably here when all the other men are off fighting? I mean, even these _Americans_ are fighting.”

Brad glances up, curious to hear Nate’s answer. That’s how he happens to be looking right at Nate when Aunt A. makes her next observation.  
  
“Really, after poor Robert’s sacrifice, I don’t know how you can live with yourself. Don’t you think it’s rather…well, cowardly? And after Robert idolized you so.”  
  
The other diners are glaring into their soup-bowls, trying to not attract the attention of Aunt Agatha, who is happily slurping her own soup. Consequently, only Brad sees the spasm of anguish flash across Nate’s face when his aunt mentions his brother. For a moment, the table is totally silent, not even the sound of spoons on crockery.  
  
“You are probably right, Aunt Agatha,” Nate says, and he sounds utterly beaten down, “but one must do the best one can.” He is looking blankly at the opposite wall when he says it, and then he seems to become aware of Brad’s gaze. He doesn’t smile or blink or shrug, he just looks at Brad full-on for a moment, concealing nothing, and Brad sees the confusion, frustration, and despair of someone locked in to a difficult and necessary job that cannot be done well. Then Nate plasters on his ‘good host’ smile and turns to his horrible aunt. “Aunt Agatha, would you like more soup?”  
  
“Goodness, no. This soup is quite weak. I must write down my recipe for you…”  
  
Aunt Agatha (finally, finally) leaves, after a few last-minute complaints about the state of the driveway and of Em’s haircut; the Ficks and their guests stand in the entry hall for a moment, shell-shocked.  
  
“Jesus!” Ray says finally turning to Em and Louisa, “Pardonnez moi French, ladies, but I regret to inform you—your aunt is a first-class, weapons-grade, no-shit _bitch_!”  
  
“Ray!” Em says, ready to admonish, and then laughs. “She really is.”  
  
“If possible,” Nate is smiling faintly, “she is getting worse.”  
  
“Bitchiness is a progressive condition,” agrees Ray somberly. “Sadly, it’s not usually fatal.”  
  
Lou spins happily around the tiles, chanting “Aunt A’s a bitch, Aunt A’s a bitch…” Brad threatens to wash her mouth out with soap, which just makes her laugh harder.  
  
Walt, hearing her giggles, comes from the back of the house and is immediately asked to provide an appropriate Polish appellation, which leads to a brief impromptu lesson on Slavic insults that has everyone choking with laughter as Ray tries to make his mouth form the right sounds. It is almost like it was before, which might be why Brad feels so hollow when the moment is over and they all drift off to their own parts of the house.

At 11:30, Brad finishes his book, unbundles himself from the blankets he’s draped on the chair near the fire and, swearing under his breath about the cold, leaves his room to return it to the library. The house is quiet around him—Walt and the farm workers are holding their own New Year’s celebration, Em has lured Ray away to a dance in the village hall (despite Brad’s warning that Ray danced like a donkey with five left feet) and Lou, undone by the anxiety of the past few days, had apparently put herself to bed early. He is a little surprised to see light under the library door. He is even more surprised when he enters and sees that, in addition to the fire, there are no fewer than a dozen candles around the room.  
  
In the middle is Nate, pouring champagne.  
  
“I was, uh, just coming to get you—in case you wanted some, er…” Nate gestures awkwardly with the bottle.  
  
“I like what you’ve done with the place,” Brad pokes at an arrangement of eight candles stuck to saucers on the mantelpiece.  
  
“I don’t know anything about Jewish holidays, but they said there were candles.” Brad notices that, next to the wineglasses, there is a leatherbound volume called _World Religions_.  
  
“You researched Hanukkah?!” Brad is not sure whether to find that endearing or exasperating. “Did your research tell you it was over three weeks ago?”  
  
“Oh,” Nate says, deflating. “Oh. I guess this is kind of ridiculous, then. Not that they were the right kind of candles, anyway.”  
  
Brad decides to be magnanimous. “It was a nice thought, though.” He takes a glass of champagne and sits by the fire. Nate tells him everything he learned reading about Hanukkah, which is actually kind of a lot, including a few things Brad didn’t know.  
  
When Nate has finished his recitation, they sit and watch the fire burn down. When it’s dark enough that Nate can’t see his face too well, Brad says, “Your aunt showed up, insulted everyone, accused you of cowardice, and…nothing. I try to buy your sisters Christmas presents—which is not, you know, something I have a lot of experience with—and I’m practically a war profiteer.”  
  
“Yes. I—I handled that badly,” Nate replies. More silence, just the sound of burning logs. “It’s just that…my aunt is a narrow-minded hypocrite who never thinks of her actions affecting others. She has been this way as long as I can remember, and she will never change. We don’t really expect better of her. But I expect more of you.”  
  
Even in the gloom, Brad can feel the intensity of Nate’s gaze. “I know less about battle than I do about Hanukkah, but I know enough to believe that politicians want to win glory and generals want to win promotions and if soldiers don’t consider the right and wrong of their individual actions, no one will do it for them.” Nate speaks with the sort of deliberateness that means he’s thought about this a long time, more than most civilians. “Someday,” Nate raises his champagne glass, “this war will be over. And we will all have to live with ourselves. There are some dark areas where deception is unavoidable in warfare; I like to operate in the light whenever possible.”  
  
“So…no black market.”  
  
“No.” There are none of the apologies, none of those terribly British ‘rather’s or ‘I’m afraid not’s.  
  
“All right.” Brad still thinks Nate is being rather naive, but the man can clearly state his principles and there’s something to be admired in that. He sticks out his hand. “Truce?”  
  
“Perpetual alliance,” Nate smiles, and they shake on it.

                                                                                                                                   ++++

Epilogue:

The new year dawns; Brad and Ray return to Tangmere and the war. America gets off its ass and starts Lend-Leasing with a vengeance. The air force no longer has to practice formations on bicycles; now they have Flying Fortresses. As soon as his arm heals, Brad is flying sorties over Holland two or three times a week. He keeps thinking he’ll run into Nate in town, but it never happens. Stafford did call him a bit of a recluse: the few town civilians know the family, but no one is too familiar with Nate.  
  
In August, the AAF rechristens Brad’s division as the First Combat Bombardment Wing (Heavy) and sends them all, lock, stock, and propeller, to the RAF base in Bassingbourn. Trained in aerial surveillance, he is retrained on B-17s and becomes part of a bomber crew. Twice, he secures enough leave to travel back to Tangmere (his vague plans consist mostly of drinking at the pub with Ray and maybe walking out to Mathilda). The first time, there are no trains. The second time, leave is cancelled at the last minute; instead of going to Tangmere, he destroys an armament factory in the Ruhr. He sends a postcard to Mathilda, but he doesn’t get a response. The next spring, he is sent to Devon and told to forget about bombs; he learns to drop parachutists. Some of those parachutists will eventually invade France; he likes to think one or two of them will reach Berlin, but he suspects that is optimistic.  
  
After a year of parachute drops, Brad is standing out by a hangar, smoking in the long light of a May evening, when he hears a whoop and a crash from the mess tent at the edge of the runway. One of the kitchen workers sticks his head out the door; he doesn’t know Brad from Adam, but he’s frantic to share the news with someone: “Hey, buddy—I heard it on the wireless! They signed the fucking treaty in France. The war is over!” That night, just for the hell of it, just because, after years of blackout, they can, the airmen turn on every lamp, lantern, and flashlight in the whole RAF compound. The Colour Sergeant leaves his rustbucket’s headlights on all night and runs the battery down; his swearing is the first sound Brad hears when he wakes up the next morning in a nation at peace.  
  
The Army—and, by extension, the Army Air Force—is full of fucking retards. Instead of being sent to the Pacific Theater (where, Brad notes, there is still a war going on), he gets sent to Germany. It’s a typical, military fuck-up: no one is sure what he’s supposed to do there, since there are no more bombs to drop and all the parachutists are going home. He is slated to fly officials around the newly surrendered country, but the place is pretty much bombed to shit, so there’s not much to see and all the officials are going home, too. He hears rumors about Nazi camps, theories about Hitler escaping to Brazil, claims that Columbia Pictures has hushed up Rita Hayworth’s death to preserve morale.He spends a lot of time wishing he’d joined the goddamn Marines, hanging out with a few other military mis-appointments—a journalist, the battalion interpreter—who also have nothing to do.

The interpreter Jean Michelle, or Meesh, speaks Algerian French and accented English. His German is heavy on phrases like ‘das Geschäft’ and’ das Bargeld’—he says he learned the language working for an importer in Marseilles in the 1930s, but Brad suspects his ties to German commerce are more recent than that. Brad wouldn’t go so far as to say Meesh is a collaborator, because that would imply he was out for anyone other than himself...but maybe that’s ‘cause Brad is still a little sensitive about black marketeers. Still, Meesh is useful to have around: he knows something about everyone, and in a wrecked economy, he trades in information. One day, for instance, he mentions that he recently ran into someone who had also been stationed at Tangmere.  
  
“Good for you,” Brad replies, careful not to ask how Meesh learned he had ever been based there.  
  
“Of course, he is not a pilot such as yourself,” Meesh continues. “My new friend, Captain Fick, he worked for this Special Operations group—the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Activity, my English friends call it. And you would not know anything about that, would you?”  
  
“I would not know anything about that,” Brad repeats, flat and even.

“That is too bad,” Meesh says, but Brad suspects he noticed a blink at the name, because Meesh goes on, “You should look him up, if ever you are in Weisbaden. You could…how is it said? Reminisce about old times’ sake.”  
  
“For old times’ sake,” Brad mumbles. “The phrase is _for old times’ sake_.”  
  
There are Jeep convoys crisscrossing the whole country, and since Brad has no official duties, it’s easy to get a day pass to join one headed toward the derelict spa town of Weisbaden. While the paperwork goes through, he asks around about the British Special Operations Executive. The secret organization has caught the public’s attention: an oddball ministry, unofficial in every sense, it ran spy rings all across occupied Europe, recruiting refugees and parachuting them back to their native countries to incite resistance against the Nazi invaders. SOE, Brad think, walking through the empty streets of Weisbaden, is the sort of work that would require a cover story. He remembers how Nate was allowed to stay on at Mathilda Farm when other civilians were moved; he recalls how exactly his first Christmas presents suited the needs of a soldier in the field.A reclusive farmer makes an excellent cover story.  
  
It is not hard to find the British contingent, just as it is really not much of a coincidence that he should run into Nate again.Europe is a big place, but Tangmere is not.Weisbaden is also big, but consists mostly of empty hotels for tourists who haven’t been here in years. The war has a way of making the world smaller…for the victors, at least.Nate has a closet of an office in a building off the Schlossplatz. A bomb demolition team is dismantling a damaged building nearby, causing so much noise that Brad can stand in the doorway for a full minute before Nate looks up. He hasn’t thought of anything to say for this particular moment—or rather, he’s thought of a thousand things to say, but none of them are right. He’d imagined meeting Nate again at Mathilda, or in Tangmere, but he’d never thought to see the man filing official paperwork in a British military uniform.  
  
“You’re a long way from home.”  
  
Nate’s head snaps up. “Wh—Brad?!” He squints like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. He stands, leaving his fountain pen to bleed all over the forms on his desk, and walks to where Brad is slouched against the doorframe. “Brad,” he confirms. “I don’t—I can’t beli—what are you doing here?”  
  
Nate looks, if possible, thinner and younger than he did before. Also, dirtier.  
  
“I might ask the same of you, sir,” Brad says. They are not in the same branch, or even the same service, but if they were, Nate would outrank him. “I thought you knew less about war than you did about Hanukkah.”  
  
“I believe I said I knew less about _battle_ ,” Nate responds smartly, and Brad feels tension melting at the thought that Nate, too, had memorized every word of their last meeting.  
  
There is a crash from the demolition squad; Nate rolls his eyes and waves Brad out the door. “Let’s walk,” he suggests, just as he did on Christmas Day two years before—and he remembers his hat on the way out the door, a nod to the grooming standard that suggests he is no summer soldier.  
  
“Intelligence,” Brad observes, tapping at the badge on Nate’s sleeve as they make their way to the river promenade. “How did that happen?”  
  
“I was recruited out of Cambridge. They needed people who could run operatives in the Mediterranean. There was a division at Tangmere Cottage that trained expatriates from the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe before dropping them back into their own countries—to radio us information, to incite the partisans, support the local resistance, that sort of thing.”  
  
“People like Walt?” Brad asks, suddenly realizing how ridiculous it would have been for the Ministry of Agriculture to send one lone Polish medical student to plant potatoes in Sussex.  
  
Nate smiles. “I cannot comment on agents still in the field, particularly if they’re in the Russian sector, but I...I think you would be very proud of Walt.”

“Did _anyone_ know?” Brad asks.  
  
“Robert—my brother,” Nate clarifies, like Brad could possibly have forgotten. “He and I joined up at the same time, but he went into the RAF and I had to be a little…quieter about it. For obvious reasons. You see,” Nate stops walking to look out over the Rhine. “Robbie didn’t know Greek. And that’s why I am alive, and he is not.”  
  
Brad still can’t wrap his mind around the timeline. “You mean, you were actually in the army the whole time? While the whole town and your crazy aunt and—while _I_ …while everybody was thinking you were a coward for not serving—”  
  
“Some people did more than just think it,” Nate observes grimly.  
  
“How could you have kept that a secret? It’s impossible.” Brad understands that the missions were secret…but even knowing that, he doesn’t think he would have been able to tolerate the humiliation of being thought a coward, of being constantly compared to friends and neighbors and found wanting…  
  
“ _Impossible_ is parachuting civilians into enemy territory with cyanide capsules and morse transmitters that could get them killed upon discovery. Do you know the average lifespan of one of our radio operator in Nazi France?” Nate demands, and Brad has to shake his head. “Six weeks. And because they were unofficial, they weren’t protected as combatants under the Rules of War. They were entirely on their own, and I sent them there. After that, anything was possible.”  
  
Brad takes Nate by the shoulders and turns him away from the river, before the intensity of Nate’s stare can set the water on fire. “I—I think I owe you an apology, sir.”  
  
Nate runs a hand through his hair; Brad can see him physically trying to calm himself. “Don’t call me _sir_ ,” Nate says at last, gently. “For the past five years, you’ve been hundreds of miles from home, flying planes in defense of—among other things—the small island where my family lives. I think…I think we’re even, Brad.”  
  
They walk the length of the promenade while the sun melts itself into the Rhine. Brad learns that Em is engaged to be married to a bombardier and that Lou, finally was evacuated to a boarding school when Nate was called to uniform service, was awarded a citation by her favorite royal, Princess Margaret Rose, because she knit more socks than any other school girl in her age group. Nate learns that Ray has somehow managed to avoid both dismemberment and dishonorable discharge. Eventually, they return to the Schlossplatz—Brad’s pass is only good for 24 hours and he needs to find the Jeep convoy.  
  
“Look,” Brad says as they stand by the bomb demolition site, now silent, “If the fucking Allies accidentally get their act together, I’ll probably get shipped out to Japan, but when I’m done there…”  
  
Nate smiles, the first genuine smile Brad has seen since he showed up in the office doorway. “You’ll know where to find me. Mathilda is beautiful in the autumn.”


End file.
